National Endowment for the Arts awards BAVC Media $100,000
San Francisco, CA — Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC Media) received $100,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to continue providing high-quality preservation services to artists and small- to mid-sized arts and cultural heritage organizations through the Preservation Access Program. Since the program began in 2013, BAVC Media has received over 150 inquiries, and has preserved more than 500 hours of media from 27 different collections, making artistic and creative content available for screenings, broadcast, installation, online delivery or exhibitions that reach thousands of viewers each year. With this new round of funding, BAVC Media will be able to continue the program through 2016.
Through its preservation work, BAVC Media aims to increase public engagement with historical and diverse media art and media-based documentation of arts and culture. “We are incredibly grateful for the support the NEA has provided for BAVC Media’s Preservation activities”, says Carol Varney, BAVC Media’s Executive Director. “With this funding BAVC Media can continue to meet the increasing demand for tape-based media preservation services for artists and arts institution clients.”
The Preservation Access Program provides a suite of services, including preservation planning, collection assessment tools and training, and analog-to-digital preservation services. For more information, please contact BAVC Media’s Preservation Department at (415) 558-2158 or visit the Preservation Access Program web page. Prospective preservation clients will be asked to complete an application describing their media collection and needs; a call for applications will open in July 2015.
In the first two years of the Preservation Access Program, those selected to receive subsidized services included Video Data Bank, New Orleans Video Access Center, MediaBurn Archive, The Poetry Center and American Poetry Archive, Janis Crystal Lipzin, the Chicago Film Archives, San Francisco Media Archive, artist/choreographer June Watanabe, Dance Theater of Harlem, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater, Wendy Rogers, Accion Latina, and Nancy Karp, among many others.
Since 1994, BAVC Media has served as a national hub for the preservation of cultural and community-based media, ensuring the survival of and continued access to video art, independently produced media and video documentation of cultural and political events since the late 1960s. Past preservation services clients include: Center for Asian American Media, Long Beach Museum of Art, MOMA, SFMOMA, The Dance Heritage Coalition, The Kitchen, Walker Art Center, Southern Exposure, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Exploratorium, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts amongst many others. Through standard preservation services, BAVC Media preserved works by Robert Altman, Ant Farm, Paper Tiger TV, Terry Fox, Doug Hall, Nam Jun Paik, John Baldessari, Paul McCarthy, William Wegman, Richard Serra and many more.
To join the Twitter conversation about this announcement, please use #NEASpring2015. For more information on projects included in the NEA grant announcement, go to arts.gov
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About BAVC Media
Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC Media) was founded in 1976 to support freedom of expression by making advanced media technology accessible to independent media makers and nonprofits. We teach. We empower creative expression. We preserve the past. And we develop future media makers and innovators. BAVC Media’s mission is to be the nation’s most advanced noncommercial media access and training center. Visit BAVC Media online at www.bavc.org.
